[UDK] Gears of War Inspired Environment - Modular
polycounter lvl 9
***LATEST UPDATE***
Hey Everyone,
I've been wanting to do a Gears of War inspired environment for a long time now. I'm always inspired when I pull up my gears inspiration folder and seeing all the work that the team at epic has put into the art style and direction of the game. I'm looking to incorporate a lot of modularity in the scene based off what I've learned by going over Kevin Johnstone's forum posts and also his Modular Environment Design power point.
I'll be trying to improve my workflow by:
- Working on the grid and trying to make sure everything will be able to snap into the right places when I do bring everything into UDK
- Using Texture space wisely by incorporating "grooves" in the high poly meshes where I can break the mesh and add variations to the existing prop
- Making the high poly in a way that I can make multiple variations of the low poly counterpart
- Using more Zbrush in my workflow once I finish as much as I can in 3Ds max (Cracks, rough stonework, etc)
For the Scene, I'll be following European Baroque Architecture and doing my best to GOW the living crap out of it. For reference I'll be using the same Interior structure and design of the Palazzo Madama in Turin Italy. I have two photography books that have great high resolution photos of everything within the interior of this buildings. This is just a picture I grabbed off google to give you guys a feel for what I'm trying to achieve.
I have a long way to go and hopefully I can pull this off to the point of having something presentable when I attend GDC this year.
It would mean so much to get feedback and critiques from you guys so lets hear them!
To start here are my wip shots of what I have so far:
Unfortunately the damn grid dosen't show up great when I use grabviewport but between each groove it spans 64 units across so my snapping of the low poly variations will work
The first two types of window wall variations I'm going to have. Between the pillars it runs 256 units across. Starting from the bottom every 256 units up I make a groove in the high poly. This way when I do go about making the low poly I can project straight on a square surface and use as much texture space as possible.
Hey Everyone,
I've been wanting to do a Gears of War inspired environment for a long time now. I'm always inspired when I pull up my gears inspiration folder and seeing all the work that the team at epic has put into the art style and direction of the game. I'm looking to incorporate a lot of modularity in the scene based off what I've learned by going over Kevin Johnstone's forum posts and also his Modular Environment Design power point.
I'll be trying to improve my workflow by:
- Working on the grid and trying to make sure everything will be able to snap into the right places when I do bring everything into UDK
- Using Texture space wisely by incorporating "grooves" in the high poly meshes where I can break the mesh and add variations to the existing prop
- Making the high poly in a way that I can make multiple variations of the low poly counterpart
- Using more Zbrush in my workflow once I finish as much as I can in 3Ds max (Cracks, rough stonework, etc)
For the Scene, I'll be following European Baroque Architecture and doing my best to GOW the living crap out of it. For reference I'll be using the same Interior structure and design of the Palazzo Madama in Turin Italy. I have two photography books that have great high resolution photos of everything within the interior of this buildings. This is just a picture I grabbed off google to give you guys a feel for what I'm trying to achieve.
I have a long way to go and hopefully I can pull this off to the point of having something presentable when I attend GDC this year.
It would mean so much to get feedback and critiques from you guys so lets hear them!
To start here are my wip shots of what I have so far:
Unfortunately the damn grid dosen't show up great when I use grabviewport but between each groove it spans 64 units across so my snapping of the low poly variations will work
The first two types of window wall variations I'm going to have. Between the pillars it runs 256 units across. Starting from the bottom every 256 units up I make a groove in the high poly. This way when I do go about making the low poly I can project straight on a square surface and use as much texture space as possible.
Replies
TrevorJ - Thanks! Hopefully my edges are soft enough. If not I'll just be going back and softening them up a bit.
Jet_Pilot - For sure I can post up wires. Anything specific you want to see?
Highpolys are looking good though! Keep it up!!
Hopefully these wire will do for those asking. If you want to see something specific just ask away and I'll do my best.
Again, Thanks for all the comments and critiques!
Cheers.
Jetta89 - Thankyou! All is explained in Kevin Johnstone's power point on "Modular Environment Design - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the grid". You can find it on his website under the help tab and its a really good read and it helps to understand the grid. You can also browse his post history and read up on his responses to similar methods.
Imasho - Thanks and will do!
Love the style gears of war has and how you pull that through here!
Love to see more of this!
Comments and critiques are very welcome!
Any insight would be great!
Mr Smo - You're welcome and thanks for stopping by!
shinobix - Thanks!
SaferDan & MeshModeler - Won't go to in depth right now and I'll make a proper breakdown when I do get time but here is a screenshot of the modifiers I use and how it generally works. I noticed now after fiddling with this technique is that you don't have to turbosmooth before the ffd's and pathdeform. Just have enough geo that it can conform around the spline you make and then you can turbosmooth. The shape on the far left is the shape that I use to follow the pathdeform. I generally start with a helix spline and work it in the shape I need. Pathdeform gets the primitive shape of a volute. The ffd is added before the pathdeform so you can change that width of certain sections on the path. You can notice that in the wider areas of the paths.
Crits and comments are welcome!
radm0bile - Thankyou for the kind words! More to come.
Dolmen - Thanks!
Been testing out the modularity on the guard rails. Made up some basic lowpolys and gave the good old pathdeform a try. A bit sketchy at the beginning but once I figured out how it generally works for this process it was smooth sailing. I managed to get a bunch of pieces ready and snapping to 8 units. Going to try these for the other pieces and post my progress. Here are the examples of some of the modularity I managed to get. Got some large and small arcs, and some angled pieces that drop down 8 units every 64 units across. If I got this right I should be able to get some stairs using Kevin Johnstone's method aswell. After getting some more pieces ready I'm going to move them into the udk to get a decent blockout.
Oh and of course this was all possible by going over his Modularity lecture. Many thanks Kevin! (hoping he see this!)
When you get a chance, can we see a wireframe of the door? Thanks
The way I went about each piece was taking references from the books and trying to gears of war the crap out of it by either adding metal details (clamps, gears, metal ornaments) or by changing a concrete slab into more of a cold chunk of metal. Also I go about the metal to make sure it looks like it was bolted there and permanent in a way.
These 2 photography books in detail are:
Palazzi Italiani - Massimo Listri - http://www.massimolistri.com/en/books/615/
Tuscany - Massimo Listri - http://www.massimolistri.com/en/books/370/
Oh and the Visual Dictionary of Architecture helps me aswell - [ame="http://www.amazon.ca/Visual-Dictionary-Architecture-Francis-Ching/dp/0470648856"]A Visual Dictionary of Architecture: Francis D. K. Ching: 9780470648858: Books - Amazon.ca[/ame]
I hope that explains how I go about each piece. If not, just tell me and I'll try my best!
Higuy - Thank you so much! No problem, here are some wires without the turbosmooth.
Really inspirational man love it. What material setup have you got going? i absolutely love it
I personally love the window piece; nice balance of classical forms mixed with some Gearsy type pieces.
It would be nice to see how these pieces transition in editor and how the scene reads as a whole. I think some very clean, flat textures should help de contrast some of the busyness in the models. A common problem that happens with this sort of style is that you are already mimicking the detail intense architecture that's present in your reference, while adding number of new materials which can lead to extremely busy scenes (which I've definitely been a culprit of!), and it will be interesting to see how you solve that.
Great stuff so far though, looking forward to seeing more.
Robeomega - Thanks and more to come!
tehrobster2 - Thankyou!
paulsvoboda - OMG its you! Thank you so much for the kind words Paul! Yea as I've been making the blockout the past couple of days and making sure I get the right snaps and all I've been really thinking of the textures and how I'm going to go about them. Definitely going to keep it simple as you said because of the details and making sure when I do bring them into zbrush to not go wild on the cracks and alphas. Going subtle on mostly everything.
For the detail bit I've been struggling to keep it together and trying to find a sweet spot between the two types of architecture. It's coming along (at least I think) and I've been posting on polycount just to get some feedback to keep everything balanced. More will be coming throughout the month and next before GDC so it would be great if you stop by once and awhile and throw in your 2 cents! Your work is so inspirational and one of the reasons I'm doing a Gears of War scene.
Going for some ceiling tiles in the scene. Took heavy inspiration from two references. One being "The Golden staircase" in Venice where I like the different sized tiles and how they were placed so its not a generic 2x2 tile running side by side across the length of the ceiling . Second inspiration came from the ceiling in the "Salon of Charles VIII" in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Firenze where each of the tiles had an inset and it created some cool depth to each tile. For the detail in each tile I tried to give some balance between the 4. Top left tile is more of the intricate tile to be placed sparingly to not overcrowd the ceiling with detail. Top Right tile is more of the GoW metal tile (Thinking I might take out the metal grid in behind the gear) which doesn't have much detail so I can place them much more and it won't crowd. Bottom tiles are different sizes and barely have any detail so I can break up the 2x2 tiles repeating over and over.
Here are some screen grabs of my initial blockout of the scene. Since the scene is pretty modular I think it can incorporate a outside terrace on both sides of the building. Depending on how far I get with the scene the outside might be scraped to fully finish the interior 100%. I'll have the outside still to help the scene have some depth from the inside out but I wont put all my effort in it till I'm satisfied with the interior.
Next on my list I have to do alot of trim work to hide alot of the open spots in the scene. The great thing is I figured out how to reuse a lot of my low poly by being very careful with making my high poly and making sure it'll snap properly.
Again comments and critiques are very welcome. If you have any questions please ask away and I'll do my best to be informative!
All in all, you've really captured the GoW art style. This stuff is just awesome. I can't wait to see where you take it.
Holy crap...you're really killin this! Absolutley amazing and inspiring stuff! This will look super awesome in the end!
Thank you also for sharing wires and your workflow! So educational!
Nothing to crit as well!
Really keen to see this progressing!
The presentation of those high poly models is really nice.
I'm looking forward to seeing you beat these pieces up
Great work.
To get higher resolution shots I use the max script "Grabviewport 2" and I get a good high res shot of the view port. I don't do anything to it in Photoshop except resize it down to a forum friendly size. Hope this helps!
AkiRa - Yup its just a viewport grab with just different standard materials. Nothing fancy. Also, thank you for the kind words! More to come
A-N-P - Thankyou! Yup I'm also looking forward to the zbrush phase of the project. Also abit scared!